Getting Started

To get started, you’ll need to download the Breakout software, make sure you have the Arduino application installed and a compatible I/O board along with a button, LED, a couple of resistors and a breadboard.

Download and Install Breakout

Upload AdvancedFirmata to your I/O board

This section assumes you are familiar with the Arduino application and the process of uploading new programs (‘sketches’) to the I/O board. If you are new to Arduino, please first see the Getting Started section for your platform (Mac, Windows or Linux) on the Arduino website.

Navigate to Breakout/firmware/AdvancedFirmata/.

Open AdvancedFirmata.ino in Arduino 1.0 or higher (Breakout requires Arduino 1.0 or higher).

Note: If you are using an Arduino Leonardo, you must first update the Firmata library in your Arduino application. See instructions here.

AdvancedFirmata is a program that allows a client application running on a computer to communicate with the I/O board, and is just one application of the Firmata protocol. See firmata.org for a complete overview.

Wire a button and LED to your I/O board

Open Breakout/examples/schematics.pdf and wire up your components according to wiring diagram on page 2. If you have no idea what the diagram means, read through the lessons in this tutorial by ladyada..

Run Breakout Server

Assuming you performed the steps in the Download and Install Breakout section above, you can now double-click on the Breakout Server application (you’ll find it in Breakout/server/) for your platform to launch it (Linux users need to launch the jar file from the command line unless you set up a custom launcher).

When you launch the server you should see the following:

Select the serial port your I/O board is connected to (if it is not already displayed in the drop down).

If you have a firewall enabled for your computer or network, make sure port 8887 is open, or enter a new port number that is open (be sure to hit the enter key upon typing in a new port number).

Click the Connect button.

You should now see this screen:

The name of your computer and the network port you are connected to should be printed along with the serial port your I/O board is connected to (on windows this will say something like “COM3″).

If you encounter any issues, refer to the Troubleshooting section of the Using Breakout Server guide. If you are still unable to get Breakout Server or the following example to work, please post the issue in the Breakout Beta Issues forum.

Running the Hello World example

Assuming you were able to launch the server and connect without any issues, you should now be ready to open an example.

Open Chrome, Firefox or Safari and enter the following url: http://localhost:8887/examples/getting_started/hello_world.html

You should be able to click the LED On an LED Off buttons to turn the LED wired to pin 11 on or off. If you press the button wired to pin 2 of the Arduino board, the button state (pressed or released) should be displayed on the screen.

If this is not working, double (or triple) check your wiring. You may have the Led backwards for example.

Note that if you changed the network port in the server you will also need to change the network port in the url above as well as in the hello_world.html file on line 71.

Running the Hello World example from the Web

You can also load files from external web servers (such as the one hosting this post). In this case Breakout Server is simply bridging the serial data from the I/O board with the websocket connection to the page you have loaded from an external server. Note that the example below will only work if you can connect to network port 8887 (because this is the port number set in the file you are loading).

With Breakout Server connected, refresh this page. Use the buttons to turn the LED on or off. Pressing the physical button on the breadboard will display the button state (pressed or released) on the screen below.

Let’s take a look at the hello_world code

The minified file Breakout.js is included on line 55. You’ll see jQuery is also included on line 56. Many of the examples use the jQuery library. jQuery is not a requirement of Breakout and is only included for the examples. You can use any javascript framework you like with Breakout.

Breakout uses the namespace BO. If you do not want to type the full namespace for each object, you can declare variables at the top of your file to refer to the objects from the Breakout library that you are using. Here are the objects used in the hello_world example:

Next an instance of the IOBoard object is created. The constructor parameters are the IP address (as a String), and the network port.

var arduino = new IOBoard(host, 8887);

Host is the IP address or hostname of the computer the IO board is connected to. The host is set to either “localhost” or window.location.hostname (which is the IP address of the computer serving this web page). Just in case the following lines don’t make sense, I’ll explain them briefly:

var host = window.location.hostname;
// if the file is opened locally, set the host to "localhost"
if (window.location.protocol.indexOf("file:") === 0) {
host = "localhost";
}

What this does is sets the host by default to window.location.hostname, but if the file is opened directly (double-clicking on the html file) instead of loading it from a server, the host is set to “localhost”. This enables the file to be opened by either means. However you can leave these lines out in your own applications and simple set the host to “localhost”, window.location.hostname, or a specific IP address. Setting host to window.location.hostname enables you to open the application locally or on a mobile device on the same network as the computer the IO board is connected to.

When an IOBoard instance is created it must finish its initialization routine before you can send any commands. Listen for the READY event to be notified when it is safe to send data to the I/O board.

arduino.addEventListener(IOBoardEvent.READY, onReady);

When the onReady method is called, the first thing you should always do is remove the event listener for the READY event:

arduino.removeEventListener(IOBoardEvent.READY, onReady);

Next an instance of an LED object is created. Breakout provides a number of hardware abstractions such as LED, Button, Servo, etc. The LED constructor parameters are a reference to the IOBoard object, and a reference to the pin the LED is connected to. The getDigitalPin(pinNumber) and getAnalogPin(analogPinNumber) methods are used to get a reference to a Pin object. See the docs for BO.Pin for details.

led = new LED(arduino, arduino.getDigitalPin(11));

Next an instance of the Button object is created. Note that if you are using a javascript UI library that also has an object named ‘Button’ then you will need to use the full namespace for the Breakout button to avoid any naming conflicts (BO.io.Button). The Button object takes 3 parameters: A reference to the IOBoard, a reference to the Pin the button is attached to, and the button mode. The default mode is Button.PULL_DOWN. Other modes are Button.PULL_UP and Button.INTERNAL_PULL_UP. Which one you use depends on how you have wired the physical button to your I/O board. If the other end of the resistor connected to the button is connected to ground, then the mode is PULL_DOWN, if the other end is connected to power, then the mode is PULL_UP and if a resistor is not used, the mode is INTERNAL_PULL_UP.

The onPress method is called whenever the physical button is pressed and the onRelease method is called every time the button is released. The parameter passed to onPress and onRelease callback functions is a reference to the event object. Each event object has a target property which refers to the object that triggered the event. Therefore event.target gives us a reference to the button that was pressed (in the case that more than one button is connected to the I/O board, this is helpful). jQuery is used simply to print the button state to the browser window.

function turnLedOn(evt) {
// turn the LED on
led.on();
}
function turnLedOff(evt) {
// turn the LED off
led.off();
}

The remaining code is simply used to show or hide the schematic view.

Next Steps

Take a look at the getting started examples in Breakout/examples/. Wire up the circuit on page 3 of the schematics.pdf and open Breakout/examples/index.html on a desktop/laptop computer, tablet or smartphone.

Try out some of the sensor and actuator examples if you have the components. There are also examples for using Breakout with Three.js and Processing.js which can be interesting if you have sensors like gyroscopes, magnetometers and accelerometers.

Check out the Using the Pin Object guide for a detailed explanation on how to use digital and analog input and output in Breakout.